Farming is not a Sunday picnic

It looks like the honeymoon is over for unproductive resettled farmers after the government warned that they risked losing their land to new owners who would use it effectively. This intervention by the authorities is long overdue, but one should consider the underlying factors that often lead to budding or resettled farmers struggling to adopt sustainable land use practices. There is no doubt that the agriculture sector remains the key priority sector in the growth and poverty reduction agenda of our nation. At a recent Bank of Namibia symposium focusing on the sector, industry players highlighted the need for innovation and improve productivity to ensure a food-secure nation. The time is indeed ripe to reinvent farming practices and we welcome to the good gesture extended to resettled farmers by the agriculture ministry. The government hopes to improve poor productivity through capacity building and developing skills among resettlement farmers. In a first for Namibia, a strategy and programme to assist resettled and Affirmative Loan Scheme farmers has been created. It is also against this background that the government has warned that it will revoke land allocated to underperforming farmers and transfer it to those that will produce. The land must be utilised productively. If not used productively, state-acquired land should be taken back. This has been our argument all along. And as much as attempts and efforts to correct the skewed land ownership have not yet achieved the desired results, there are many Namibians who are land-hungry and could do a fantastic job. Of course there are natural challenges such as inconsistent weather patterns and geographic isolation from market centres, on top of low levels of literacy, that have hindered our productivity in recent years. However, we must take farming as a serious business and cost-effective production methods should be employed to realise the dream of turning our country into a breadbasket. Black farmers, especially, struggle with start-ups to expand their agribusinesses, and it is up to them now to take up the challenge because they are also capable of fulfilling the role of agricultural producers.